Journalism, Power, and Fake News: A Perspective from Latin America

What is the role of the press in a self-styled free society? What are the causes and consequences of fake news? These are critical questions with which many global societies, not just the United States, grapple.
Award-winning journalist Alejandra Matus addresses them from the perspective of her native Chile. Matus draws on the experience of Cold War-era authoritarian governments in Latin America to argue that fake news and the collapse of journalistic authority are not new. It is a contention with which she has all-too-personal experience. Thanks to her investigations exposing the crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship, Matus was forced into exile—a decade after the dictatorship ended. In a lecture open to the campus and wider community, Matus draws on thirty years’ experience to explore pressing questions about media and power today.